An additional equity grant given to a tenured employee, layered on top of their original grant so that unvested equity does not trickle to zero as the four-year vesting curve runs out.
By the mid-2010s, public tech employers normalized annual RSU refreshers tied to performance review cycles, typically twenty-five to fifty percent of the initial grant. The practice spread to private companies once Carta data showed engineers were leaving for the refresh, not the base salary, around year three of tenure.